See The Daily's multimedia coverage of the Lone Grove tornado.

LONE GROVE — Michael and Margaret Akersten have half of their trailer home left.

The south side of their home has been sheared off to reveal half of a living room. Every surface is covered by broken glass or tree limbs.

They’re some of the lucky ones.

Their half-trailer is now one of the tallest structures in the Bar K Mobile Home Park, which was demolished by an FE-4 tornado that ripped through Lone Grove Tuesday night, killing eight.

By Thursday, residents had returned to sort through the rubble. The tornado transformed the trailer park into a bizarre collection of out-of-place objects. Ceiling fans lay on the ground, mattresses were lodged in trees.

All but one home had disappeared; their contents emptied into loose piles topped by twisted tree branches.

Residents picked through the piles, looking for wallets, money and things that couldn’t be replaced.

“I found some quilts my grandma made me,” Ginger Byrne said as she stood by the lot where her trailer used to be. ”I found my son’s baby pictures. I found my study Bible and a Bible I got from the Gideons in 1954.”

Byrne has lived at Bar K since 1995. She spent Tuesday night with her mother, who has a storm cellar. The next day she tried to return home but was stopped by police officers.

“They were still riding around on four-wheelers, looking for bodies,” Byrne said.

She was allowed to return Wednesday afternoon and started looking for her belongings, but soon realized she would have to expand her search.

“That’s my iron up there,” she said, pointing to an iron dangling from a tree several dozen yards away from where she was standing. “And see that tree way down there? I was looking and realized my favorite shirt was up there. So I sent my son and his friend down there to get it. They had to work so hard to get it out. They said it was all twisted and knotted, that the bark had split open and the shirt had been pushed into it. I’ll have to wear that shirt every other day now.”

Her home is gone and her possessions are scattered across the park, but Byrne said she considers herself fortunate. She has insurance and she didn’t lose any friends or family.

Byrne’s neighbors weren’t so lucky. Next door, Mark Nevill was videotaping the piles of debris that marked where his parents’ trailer once stood. Nevill, a California resident, got a phone call from his cousin Tuesday night. He told him Nevill’s parents had been hospitalized and his brother was missing.

“I was hoping he was just unconscious somewhere, waiting to be found,” he said quietly. “But when I didn’t hear anything for a few hours after that, I knew it was something worse.”

When Nevill arrived in Lone Grove, he was told his parents, who were still in the hospital, would be OK. But his brother’s body had been discovered down the road from the family’s trailer.

“A tree fell on the main room and saved my parents,” he said. “But my brother was in the back room, and he got blown out.”

Escape

Most of the people at Bar K Thursday left Tuesday night. Many said they heard tornado sirens for a few seconds before they fled, and they all believed they had barely escaped the tornado.

Byrne said she made it to her mother’s house just as the tornado touched down.

“By the time we got into the cellar, this house was probably already gone,” she said, gesturing to her empty lot.

The Akerstens left too. They were watching TV with their daughter Marie Miller and her children Tuesday night when Akersten thought he heard sirens. He told his wife to change the channel and when the weather map came on the screen, she told everybody to get out of the house.

“I was flying out of there,” she said. Hail and heavy winds battered the family’s car as they made their way to take shelter at the post office, fighting strong winds to get inside.

“I had a hold of a pole and my dog,” Miller said. “When I let go of the pole to try to go inside, the wind picked me up and threw me.”

Miller said she fell and rolled away from the door. Her son rushed out of the post office to pull her in the building.

Michael Akersten said he and his family were grateful to be alive, and his community was fortunate to have not suffered more than it did.

“You hate to say you’re lucky, because of the people who did die,” he said as he looked at the trailer park in front of him. “But really, we were lucky there wasn’t a hell of a lot more.”

Uncertainty

Bar K residents said in the hours after the tornado, they were literally left in the dark as they wondered what had happened to their friends, families and homes. Power was out and the roads to the park were blocked.

News came slowly Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. The few who returned to the trailer park immediately after the tornado were asked to leave by police officers. No one was allowed back until Wednesday afternoon, when law enforcement had finished searching for bodies.

The uncertainty of waiting led many to fear the worst about the friends they hadn’t heard from.

“We were afraid everybody was dead,” Margaret Akersten said.

But the uncertainty also led to some joyful reunions between friends.

“We had one friend, we thought he was history, but he showed up today,” Margaret Akersten said. “We jumped up and we were yelling, ‘You’re alive!’ We were so happy to see him, because we thought he was a goner.”

The next step

Bar K residents said many of their neighbors don’t have insurance. Federal assistance could be available to Lone Grove residents if President Barack Obama declares it a major disaster area.

A declaration of disaster could come in the next three or four days, said Winston Barton, Federal Emergency Management Association public information officer.

“They’ll get help if there’s enough damage, and there’s plenty of damage here,” Barton said.

Help could come in the form of money to help repair homes, but there is little left to repair in the park.

Barton said those whose homes have been destroyed could be eligible for $28,000 grants or Small Business Association loans that would allow them to borrow money at 2.8 percent interest and not start making payments for six months.

For now, the residents are in limbo. They can sort through the wreckage of their homes for personal belongings, but major cleanup won’t begin until FEMA and insurance companies finish assessing the damage.

Barton said FEMA will be finished with its work today, and Byrne said she had been told bulldozers might be on the scene as soon as Saturday. Then, residents will begin to decide where, and in what, they are going to live.

In the meantime, they’re staying with friends and relatives and trying to comfort each other.

“During stuff like this, you find out who your family is,” Michael Akersten said. “It’s the people who show up to help you.”

Help has been forthcoming for this community, where FEMA, the Red Cross and the Salvation Army are on site and organizations and individuals from around the area have come to offer their services.

And the neighbors, even those who have lost almost everything, are supporting each other.

As Byrne leaned on her cane near the tree that held her iron, a pickup truck pulled up beside hers. She walked slowly to the man who got out and asked him how his house looked. He shook his head.

“God is going to be with you,” she said, putting her arms around him. “God is going to be with you.”

Lone Grove tornado touches hearts of Sooners

LONE GROVE — It may be 80 miles away from Norman and even farther from Stillwater, but tornado-ravaged Lone Grove is heavily invested in Oklahoma’s intrastate collegiate rivalry.

It’s a town that leans crimson, said Kati Jackson, psychology junior and Lone Grove native.

Sooner paraphernalia was visible among the rubble Thursday at Bar K Mobile Home Park.

“There’s probably some OU shirts in there somewhere,” Bar K homeowner Michael Akersten said, gesturing at the pile of debris and household goods that filled his now half-living room.

Akersten said he was going to miss the OU doll that played “Boomer Sooner,” but his daughter interrupted him.

“No, we found that!” she said. “Someone picked it up off the ground.”

OU is a temporary home to several students from Lone Grove. Jacklyn Chaney grew up in Lone Grove. Her grandfather’s building on Lone Grove’s main drag was destroyed Tuesday.

Chaney, University College freshman, drove home to be with her family after the tornado. On her way back to Norman Thursday, she rattled off a list of familiar Lone Grove businesses that had been destroyed.

“Across the street from my grandfather’s store, you have the furniture store, the Chamber of Commerce, it’s all gone,” she said.

Some students are making plans to help their community with cleanup this weekend.

Frank Wood, zoology senior, stated in an e-mail that his mom has started volunteering and he and some friends will be on their way today.

“[My mom] has gone to a friend’s house, to help pick up what’s left of her two-story house,” Wood stated.

Dog chained to fence survives deadly twister

What a lucky dog.

Rufus, one of Sherry Franks’ two dogs, was chained in Franks’ backyard when an EF-4 tornado slammed through Lone Grove Tuesday night.

Franks said the tornado caught her off guard. The weather forecast had been bad, but she brushed off her husband’s warnings about a tornado.

“I wasn’t worried,” she said. “It was February. We don’t get tornadoes like this in February.”

By the time she realized the threat was serious, she only had time to grab her smaller dog and rush barefoot into her bedroom.

The tornado came down, snapping trees and ripping off roofs around Franks’s house. It shattered Franks’s windows and drove a stick into the side of her car. Behind her house, the tornado sent a tree crashing down on a trampoline and relocated a barbecue.

But it didn’t hurt Rufus, who was just fine when Franks emerged from her house after the tornado, which she said “sounded like a freight train coming over the top of us.”

His doghouse had been thrown at least 40 yards north of her house, but Rufus was unharmed.

“There’s no telling where he was flying around,” Franks said. “But he made it.”